Saying that something is “cutting-edge” is shortcut to implying it represents the most advanced position in a field.

The edge, away from the center, is where experiments take place new ideas take form. Using conversation as a technology, Edge.org was founded to invite the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

Each year is marked by a question. For 2015, the question is What do you think about machines that think? Daniel C. Dennet, Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, Intuition Pumps provides an interesting perspective:

The Singularity—the fateful moment when AI surpasses its creators in intelligence and takes over the world—is a meme worth pondering.

It has the earmarks of an urban legend: a certain scientific plausibility ("Well, in principle I guess it's possible!") coupled with a deliciously shudder-inducing punch line ("We'd be ruled by robots!"). Did you know that if you sneeze, belch, and fart all at the same time, you die? Wow.

Following in the wake of decades of AI hype, you might think the Singularity would be regarded as a parody, a joke, but it has proven to be a remarkably persuasive escalation. Add a few illustrious converts—Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and David Chalmers, among others—and how can we not take it seriously?

Whether this stupendous event takes place ten or a hundred or a thousand years in the future, isn't it prudent to start planning now, setting up the necessary barricades and keeping our eyes peeled for harbingers of catastrophe?

Taking a contrarian view, he argues that we are actually about to cede control of thinking to agent that can't think, thus depriving ourselves of important stimulation to keep our minds elastic - why remember how to find a location via relying on a sense of direction when we can open Google maps or a GPS? (keep those phones charged!)

I think, on the contrary, that these alarm calls distract us from a more pressing problem, an impending disaster that won't need any help from Moore's Law or further breakthroughs in theory to reach its much closer tipping point: after centuries of hard-won understanding of nature that now permits us, for the first time in history, to control many aspects of our destinies, we are on the verge of abdicating this control to artificial agents that can't think, prematurely putting civilization on auto-pilot.

The process is insidious because each step of it makes good local sense, is an offer you can't refuse. You'd be a fool today to do large arithmetical calculations with pencil and paper when a hand calculator is much faster and almost perfectly reliable (don't forget about round-off error), and why memorize train timetables when they are instantly available on your smart phone? Leave the map-reading and navigation to your GPS system; it isn't conscious; it can't think in any meaningful sense, but it's much better than you are at keeping track of where you are and where you want to go.

That is the easy example. Now let's escalate to more complex bodies of knowledge... and practice. Dennet says:

Much farther up the staircase, doctors are becoming increasingly dependent on diagnostic systems that are provably more reliable than any human diagnostician. Do you want your doctor to overrule the machine's verdict when it comes to making a life-saving choice of treatment?

This may prove to be the best—most provably successful, most immediately useful—application of the technology behind IBM's Watson, and the issue of whether or not Watson can be properly said to think (or be conscious) is beside the point. If Watson turns out to be better than human experts at generating diagnoses from available data it will be morally obligatory to avail ourselves of its results. A doctor who defies it will be asking for a malpractice suit.

No area of human endeavor appears to be clearly off-limits to such prosthetic performance-enhancers, and wherever they prove themselves, the forced choice will be reliable results over the human touch, as it always has been. Hand-made law and even science could come to occupy niches adjacent to artisanal pottery and hand-knitted sweaters.

How did we get here and why we are asking the question.

In the earliest days of AI, an attempt was made to enforce a sharp distinction between artificial intelligence and cognitive simulation.

The former was to be a branch of engineering, getting the job done by hook or by crook, with no attempt to mimic human thought processes—except when that proved to be an effective way of proceeding.

Cognitive simulation, in contrast, was to be psychology and neuroscience conducted by computer modeling. A cognitive simulation model that nicely exhibited recognizably human errors or confusions would be a triumph, not a failure.

The distinction in aspiration lives on, but has largely been erased from public consciousness: to lay people AI means passing the Turing Test, being humanoid.

The recent breakthroughs in AI have been largely the result of turning away from (what we thought we understood about) human thought processes and using the awesome data-mining powers of super-computers to grind out valuable connections and patterns without trying to make them understand what they are doing.

Ironically, the impressive results are inspiring many in cognitive science to reconsider; it turns out that there is much to learn about how the brain does its brilliant job of producing future by applying the techniques of data-mining and machine learning.

It is a miracle how many times our brains, the wet systems inside a hard skull, fire synapses to deliver right answers through deduction, which is incredibly efficient (compare that to a machine that looks up volumes of what is not very fast).

To build on that thought further, we all have areas of competence, and we perform better when we operate within or not far from them. Daniel C. Dennet concludes:

But the public will persist in imagining that any black box that can do that (whatever the latest AI accomplishment is) must be an intelligent agent much like a human being, when in fact what is inside the box is a bizarrely truncated, two-dimensional fabric that gains its power precisely by not adding the overhead of a human mind, with all its distractability, worries, emotional commitments, memories, allegiances. It is not a humanoid robot at all but a mindless slave, the latest advance in auto-pilots.

What's wrong with turning over the drudgery of thought to such high-tech marvels? Nothing, so long as (1) we don't delude ourselves, and (2) we somehow manage to keep our own cognitive skills from atrophying.

(1) It is very, very hard to imagine (and keep in mind) the limitations of entities that can be such valued assistants, and the human tendency is always to over-endow them with understanding—as we have known since Joe Weizenbaum's notorious Eliza program of the early 1970s. This is a huge risk, since we will always be tempted to ask more of them than they were designed to accomplish, and to trust the results when we shouldn't.

(2) Use it or lose it. As we become ever more dependent on these cognitive prostheses, we risk becoming helpless if they ever shut down. The Internet is not an intelligent agent (well, in some ways it is) but we have nevertheless become so dependent on it that were it to crash, panic would set in and we could destroy society in a few days. That's an event we should bend our efforts to averting now, because it could happen any day.

The real danger, then, is not machines that are more intelligent than we are usurping our role as captains of our destinies. The real danger is basically clueless machines being ceded authority far beyond their competence.

What we do with what we learn in addition to how we learn it is not just a thought exercise. It's a provocative response that addresses the layers of assumptions attached to the question by contemporary culture and mainstream repetition.

In the last ten years, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, collected and published the contributions. Many of the questions are still compelling today. Starting from 2005 to 2014:

What We Believe but Cannot Prove - Scientific theory, more often than not, is born of bold assumption, disparate bits of unconnected evidence, and educated leaps of faith. Some of the most potent beliefs among brilliant minds are based on supposition alone -- yet that is enough to push those minds toward making the theory viable.

What Is Your Dangerous Idea? - From Copernicus to Darwin, to current-day thinkers, scientists have always promoted theories and unveiled discoveries that challenge everything society holds dear; ideas with both positive and dire consequences. Many thoughts that resonate today are dangerous not because they are assumed to be false, but because they might turn out to be true.

What Are You Optimistic About? - The nightly news and conventional wisdom tell us that things are bad and getting worse. Yet despite dire predictions, scientists see many good things on the horizon.

Curiosity is the secret to a bigger life - it opens us to learning and helps us build human connections. Questions are a high-level form of thinking and we should become more aware of the power of inquiry and how it benefits us.

After 11 years, CBC Radio's WireTap comes to a close. In his farewell message#, show creator Jonathan Goldstein says:

A while ago, we did a radio story that seemed to have stuck with people. We decided to invite listeners down to the CBC and make it into a video. It's all about growing up and how that process never ends.

Reality is complex, it rarely offers two choices. We are often called to make decisions with not much to go on.

Because our formative years are the most filled with challenges and choices that will impact our future selves as we are in the process of discovering or deciding who we are, it's important we learn to approach questions from multiple sides.

Rebecca Stead's new book, Goodbye Stranger -- a novel about friendship, family, love, and the challenges facing middle school youth today -- deals specifically with those challenges through the perspectives of the people who live them.

The most formative were the ones she read around age 11 or 12, on the border between childhood and puberty. “For me, that time was an awakening,” she said. “I began to see more complexity in the world around me, I began to have different kinds of thoughts, I began to form deeper friendships. I think that a lot of that was inspired by the books that I was reading. For the first time, really, I had access to the internal lives of other people.

“They didn’t happen to be real people, because I was reading fiction, but the emotion was true,” she continued. “And so there was a way in which I was learning about myself by reading about the inner lives of people who didn’t exist. I think that’s one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself, by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.”

This is a process we all go through when reading stories, whether we're aware of it or not. If we want to invite more luck into our lives, we could read or reread great novels and plays and pay attention to the unlucky outcomes. What could the protagonists have done instead? How would we have approached the situation?

Great poets and writers are so because they learn to trust their readers:

Stead trusts her readers to be able to dig into that moral complexity. “I do try to write in ways that reflect reality,” she says, “and I think that reality is rarely simple. And often there aren’t two choices.” She mentions the ongoing riddle in the book, about two brothers standing in front of the door to heaven and the door to hell, and one character’s response: “People act like riddles are hard, but real life is harder. In real life, there are always more than two doors.”

Luck (noun): Events that influence our lives but are not of our making.

We deny the role of luck because: (1) we prefer to think we are in control of our plans and actions, (2) discussing luck diminishes our role, (3) our culture is dominated by the Work Ethic that says “we're supposed to make our way in life by hard work, perseverance, fortitude,” etc.

Thus the first step to improve our luck is to acknowledge that it exists:

lucky people characteristically organize their lives in such a way that they are in a position to experience good luck and to avoid bad luck.

Gunther calls his thirteen techniques of lucky positioning.

1.) Making the luck / planning distinction - balancing activities to consider both

If you want to be a winner, you must stay keenly aware of the role luck plays in your life. When a desired outcome is brought about by luck, you must acknowledge that fact. Don't try to tell yourself the outcome came because you were smart. Never confuse luck with planning.

[...]

When you clearly see how luck affects a given situation, then you become strongly aware that the situation is bound to change. it can change radically, rapidly, without warning, in unpredictable ways. You cannot know what the change will be or when it will happen, but you can be perfectly sure it will happen sooner or later. The one thing you cannot expect is the very thing the loser expects: continuity, a repetition of yesterday's events.

Of course, many situations rely more on planning than luck, “the trick is to know what kind of situation you are in at any given time.” It's thus important to understand the luck/planning ratio and to look outside as well as inside for an explanation of occurrences.

2.) Finding the fast flow - being around people and situations where things are happening

New York management consultant Eric Wachtel says: “This doesn't mean you have to be one of those Personality Kids who know everyone in town. We can't all be the life of the party. Some of us are quieter than others. But we can all go around with a look and attitude that says we want to be friendly. We can stay active. The worst thing you can do is withdraw from the network of friendships and acquaintanceships at home and at work. If you aren't in the network, nobody is ever going to steer anything your way.”

In the business world as in the movies, the big breaks flow through contacts between people. Not necessarily close friendships, just contacts - sometimes tenuous ones.

This technique takes advantage of the “small-world phenomenon.” But to take advantage of a linked chain of people we need another necessary ingredient.

It is necessary for them to know what you would consider a lucky break.

3.) Risk spooning - taking a risk by dipping toes vs. diving in

Many people, especially of the plodder breed, hate a successful gambler. They hate him largely because they hate themselves for not having had the guts to take their own risks. He stands there rich, happy and having a world of fun; a living advertisement for what they might have been. Seeking acceptable reasons to dislike him, they cultivate the notion that gambling is, in some way, impure.

[...]

Thus, antirisk mentality keeps its dominance. Even the very biggest risk takers and the very luckiest gamblers are determined to show they are nothing of the kind.

[...]

It is essential to take risks. Examine the life of any lucky man or woman, and you are all but certain to find that he or she was willing, at some point, to take a risk. Without that willingness, hardly anything interesting is likely happening to you.

[...]

One trait of the consistently lucky is that they are able to assess risk-reward ratios even amid confusion and ambiguity.

The opposite of learning to take small risks for small gains is taking big risks for small gains. Not as common as those who avoid risk, those who dive in are also forgetting the role of luck.

4.) Run cutting - knowing when to cash in to stay ahead

“Don't push your luck,” says the ancient maxim.

[...]

Always assume a given run will be short. You will always be right. The law of averages is heavily on your side.

[...]

One of the oldest and wrongest pieces of advice you hear around Wall Street is “Cut your losses but let your profits ride.” There is nothing wrong with the part about cutting losses. [...] But the last half of the adage, the part about letting profits ride, is a recipe for bad luck.

Taleb addresses this specifically in Fooled by Randomness where he delves into why “a large selection of businessmen with outstanding track record will (at any point in time) be no better than randomly thrown darts.”

5.) Luck selection - being ready to cut losses

“Cut your losses,” they tell each other on Wall Street. Though few can do it well consistently, it is still good advice. And it doesn't apply only to the stock market. It applied everywhere.

[...]

Lucky people have the knack for doing that, and it is one of the chief contributors to their good fortune. The knack is not easy to acquire.

[...]

One reason why luck selection is so difficult for most people is that it almost always involves the need to abandon part of an investment. The investment may be in the form of time, commitment, love, money, or something else. Whatever it is, you leave some of it behind when you discard a bad hand.

[...]

Another reason why luck selection is difficult for most is that it often requires a painful confession: “I was wrong.”

Learning to do this better requires a healthy dose of realism to help avoid unfounded optimism.

6.) The zigzag path - because luck is never linear

This doesn't mean you should make frequent changes just for the sake of change itself. It means only that if a piece of potential good luck drifts your way, you should not summarily reject it simply because it doesn't fit some predesigned plan.

[...]

Use [long term plans] for general guidance as long as they seem to be taking you where you want to go, but whatever you do, don't get stuck with them. Throw them in the trash heap as soon as something better comes along.

[...]

Never be afraid to zigzag. [...] You never know which direction your lucky breaks may come from. When they drift into reach, grab them.

7.) Constructive supernaturalism - being pragmatic while believing

The connection is that a supernatural belief, even a trivial and humorous one, helps people get lucky by helping them make otherwise impossible choices.

Life is full of situations in which you must choose among alternatives but lack any rational basis for choosing.

[...]

Many people -- the unlucky -- would just stand there paralyzed, unable to make the impossible choice. But we saw in our studies of the Third Technique, risk spooning, that getting lucky requires taking risks. We also saw that we rarely have all the facts we could wish for when embarking on a risk course, and sometimes we have no facts at all. This is where the lucky can make a supernatural belief pay off.

[...]

“A superstition won't do you any harm as long as you don't use it as a substitute for thinking,” said Charles Goren, the bridge master. [...] “In fact, a superstition can help you. If it makes you feel good to sit facing in a certain direction, then probably you'll play better. You'll get up from the table with the feeling that you improved your luck.”

In bridge as in life we need to play the cards we are dealt.

8.) Worst-case analysis - being prepared for catastrophe

This means rejecting unfounded optimism and preparing to handle the worst.

“I know this situation can go wrong. Now I've got to ask how it can go wrong. What is the worst possible outcome? Or if there are two or more 'worst' outcomes, what are they? How can it go wrongest? And if the worst does happen, what will I do to save myself?”

Hope is not a strategy.

9.) The closed mouth - not speaking unless you absolutely must or you may regret it later

The trouble with too much talk is that it can constrict that valuable freedom and flexibility. Talk can tie you up, lock you into positions that seem right today but may be wrong tomorrow.

“I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence,” wrote Publilius Syrus, a Roman author of mimes and aphorisms who flourished in the first century B.C.

[...]

Silence doesn't only protect you from getting locked into unwanted positions, and it doesn't only keep you from revealing facts and feelings you may not want known. It has one great virtue. By avoiding excessive communication, lucky men and women are freed of the need to explain and justify actions to other people.

Other people's opinions can tangle you and slow you disastrously.

This technique comes into play when we make promises. An example is telling the story of how something good happened after it has already taken place

10.) Recognizing a non-lesson - sometimes there is nothing to learn but that luck exists

There are experiences in life that seem to be lessons but aren't. A noteworthy trait of the lucky is that they know what they can't learn anything from.

For example, we cannot learned detailed lessons about the future by studying the past. Is the following true?

“Those who persistently fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it.” This statement has been variously attributed to several nineteenth-century statesmen, who in turn may have plagiarized it from somebody still earlier. It's clever, but is it true? Unfortunately, no, except in the most vague and general way.

[...]

History is the product of what billions of men and women are doing, thinking, and feeling at any given time. It is in constant flux. It is entirely unpredictable.

It can teach generalized lessons, some of them huge like “War is hell.” but it can't teach us out to stay out of it. We can become better at telling whether an outcome is due to luck or something more reliable, like character, by looking for “visible links of cause and effect.”

11.) Accepting an unfair universe - dealing with this reality rather than pining over it

This will likely be the hardest of the thirteen techniques. We get what we get in life.

Just as it is misleading to blame yourself for bad luck, you also delude yourself when you come to a belief that you “deserve” good luck. You may well deserve it, but whether you will get it is a matter of - well, luck.

Shakespeare's difficult but powerful play King Lear has offended many critics, including Charles Lamb, mainly because it is the story of a lot of people who deserve good luck but don't get it.

12.) The juggling act - always be working Plans B, C, D, etc. as well

Luckier people are busier.

Lucky people always seem to have many ventures going on at the same time. Even at the height of success in a major venture such as a career, the lucky man or woman will usually have secondary ventures going or in preparation or under study - sometimes in bewildering variety.

[...]

This Twelfth Technique is closely allied with the Second: Fast Flow orientation, and the Sixth: the zigzag path.

[...]

The lucky life tends to look considerably more harried to others than it feels to the man or woman living it.

What counts is how you feel about the activity. It is the worries that often make us panic, not being in the midst of many activities. We can stabilize worries that may crop up by writing them down.

A destiny partner is more than just a friend. A friend is someone you like and have fun with. The liking may even be profound enough to deserve the name love. But if a person doesn't actively change the course of your life and the nature of your luck, then “friend” is the only right word.

[...]

How do you meet a destiny partner [someone who actively changes the course of your life]? It usually happens by blind luck [...] That being so, the best way to boost your chances of meeting the person who will change your luck is to practice the Second Technique: Put yourself in the fast flow.

[...]

If your potential partner walks into your life -- a person with whom you feel a quick, strong and positive reaction -- don't let that person simply walk back out. At least keep the newborn relationship alive while you assess it and see where it might go for a chance might not come around again.

While it is impossible to predict with absolute certainty when and how something good will happen to us, by practicing the thirteen techniques in How to Get Lucky consistently most of the time, we can get lucky and discover opportunities.

Gunther suggests a good way to start is to “ask yourself which technique has been most notably lacking in your approach to life.” Focus on identifying your main problem with luck. Then set out to learn how to gain an edge.

“A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance,” says Pamela Meyer. “Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.”

We are not always willing participants. Master forger and con man Henry Oberlander who was active in the 1930s understood human psychology well. “Everyone is willing to give something for whatever it is they desire the most,” he said. This became famous as “Henry's Rule,” and gives us a view into why deception is so profitable.

Research reveals the complexity of lying. Meyer says:

On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. (Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now, you may think that's bad. If you're unmarried, that number drops to three.

Lying is woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. That's truth number two about lying. We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World.

There's is an evolutionary aspect of lying. For example, many parents learn that their babies sometimes fake crying to get attention, and two year old children bluff to keep testing those boundaries of what is possible and what is not allowed.

Aldert Vrij, a Professor of Applied Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the University of Portsmouth (UK) has been researching the nonverbal and verbal cues to deception and lie detection.

Science has surfaced many indicators, and Vrji's book Detecting Lies and Deceit: Pitfalls and Opportunities is a comprehensive resource for anyone who wants to understand the working and efficacy of the most commonly used lie detection tools covering all three aspects of deception -- nonverbal cues, speech and written statement analysis and (neuro)physiological responses.

What can we do to learn the truth?

“Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time,” says Pamela Meyer. For those who are curious about becoming better at spotting lies but don't have time for Detecting Lies and Deceipt's deep dive, three former CIA officers share their techniques in Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Detect Deception.

[...] There are good liars and bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques.

[...] Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language.

[...] We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool.

Qualifying language also further discredits the source. We can learn to get better at identifying the signs someone is lying. Spam, phishing schemes, fake digital friends, and partisan media are teaching us how to spot similar patterns in writing, including the typos and misspellings.

Body language is where we need to be more careful and let the science guide us. Meyers says:

With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away.

[...] when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators.

What's the difference when talking with someone who is honest?

An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks." They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview. And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment.

We have “blind spots,” say Bazerman and Tenbrunsel to explain why people with good intentions may fail to act in accordance with their own ethical standards. In Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It, a book written for managers and leaders, they say that “without an awareness of blind sports, traditional approaches to ethics won't be particular useful in improving behavior.”

When looking at problems, leaders should consider if:

it's an ethical or a non-ethical issue (for example, a business or an engineering decision)

prejudices that are outside of their conscious awareness may motivate their behaviors

informal or unwritten forces within the organization encourage employees to ignore or minimize the ethical implications of a decision, or

factors like isolation, uncertainty, and time pressure increase the likelihood of an unethical decision

“Character's who you are in the dark,” says Meyer.

And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It's a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency -- character integrity -- that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code.

Ariely says that “most of us need little reminders to keep ourselves on the right path.” Good leaders make use of behavioral prompts and cues to affect their environment.

Being willing to engage in an open conversation about ethics and human psychology can help us draw the line on “Henry's Rule” and work on the “fudge factor.”

Watch Pamela Meyer full talk for visual examples below.

For those who are still curious about the science of lying, in addition to her own book, Meyer recommends the following:

The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More -- psychologist David DeSteno talks about how trust is risky but necessary, useful, and even powerful and we need to develop, strengthen, and manage it and how it permeates almost every area of life. He says we should examine motives by using on behavior rather than reassurance, pay attention to our intuition, cultivate trust from the bottom up, and much more. Trust is something we feel.

Modern conversations on leadership have us talk about purpose on one hand and power on the other. “While our purpose shows us out priorities in life,” says William E. Smith, Ph.D. “And our power reveals our capacity to achieve the ends we seek, our leadership shows us how we lead our lives -- i.e. how we integrate our purpose and power into the way in which we engage with others and with our world in the situations we face.”

He introduces appreciation, influence and control (AIC) -- a simple and natural model that can help us answer the question:

What does it take for each of us to conduct our life and work so that by doing what we do and being who we are we automatically contribute to the common good?

Says Smith:

Just as our concept of power has been shifting to include more influence and appreciation, so has our concept of leadership shifted:

from a focus on the individual who possesses a certain specific set of resources, skills and attitudes (the control perspective)

to a concept of shared or democratic leadership (the influence perspective) and,

most recently, to a concept of leadership as a function everyone can perform by linking themselves to others and their world (the appreciative perspective)

It is not difficult, then, to see that our preference for power very much affects our approach to the way we lead our lives, the way we relate to others and the way we relate to our world.

A leader who is more appreciative is more open, idealistic and holistic. We call that leader spiritual. A leader who emphasizes influence, i.e. relationships, we call charismatic; and a leader who emphasizes control, i.e. focusing on getting things done, we call pragmatic. All of us have components of all three, but our leadership style is the relative emphasis we give to each of the three.

Where did AIC originate?

Says Smith:

AIC grew out of my personal search for an explanation of what seemed to be an accidental example of high performance in my first full-time job as an airport manager. I was working for British Overseas Airlines and made Rome the best-performing airport network in six months—without the power of control to tell people what to do and without spending any extra funds. Neither I nor anyone else in the airline was able to explain the results.

[...] Through a five-year program of action research [at the Wharton Graduate School of Business] I finally discovered a set of naturally occurring power relationships that accounted for high levels of achievement and could explain the achievement in Rome.

I called these three power relationships—appreciation, influence and control—AIC. When leaders and organizations pay equal attention to these powers the results they receive go exponentially beyond their expectations. It was, especially, the addition of the idea of appreciation—taking into account all those variables that affect your performance but that you cannot influence or control—that accounted for the dramatic change.

Below is a short video narrative of the key inflection points that led to the research and its applications.

When we gain a better understanding of these relationships, we can become more effective leaders.

“Chains of habits are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.”

[Warren Buffet]

As our world has become more complex, so have our attempts to manage it by trying to predict ahead of time every possible scenario. Little by little, we have gotten into the habit of upping the ante on complexity with more complexity.

The habit is felt more strongly inside organizations where regulations and procedures can keep building on top of each other unchecked to unmanageable proportions. The tax code is a good example of this.

Instead of trying to cover all bases, say Donald Sull and Kathleen Eisenhardt in Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, we should use a small set of simple rules -- “shortcut strategies that save time and effort by focusing our attention and simplifying the way we process information.”

The authors' definition of strategy thus is:

Strategy, in our view, lives in the simple rules that guide an organization's most important activities.

Simple rules are those rules that are fundamental to achieving successful outcomes.

Why do simple rules work?

Because they do three things well. They:

confer flexibility to pursue new opportunities while maintaining some consistency

can produce better decisions -- when information is limited and time is short, simple rules make it fast and easy for people, organizations, and governments to make sound choices

allow the members of a community to synchronize their activities with one another on the fly -- as a result, communities can do things that would be impossible for their individual members to achieve on their own

What are the common traits of simple rules?

1. they are limited to a handful -- to maintain the focus on what matters most and be memorable

2. they are tailored to the person or organization using them -- for example, a nutrition program designed to lose weight is different from one used for athletic performance

3. they apply to a well-defined activity or decision -- trying to cover all bases injects vagueness and dilutes their impact

4. they provide clear guidance while conferring the latitude to exercise discretion -- so that we can exercise judgement

To sum it up, simple rules:

refers to a handful of guidelines tailored to the user and task at hand, which balance concrete guidance with the freedom to exercise judgement.

If simple rules help solve complex problems, why aren't they more common? First among the reasons is that simplicity requires time and effort to achieve. As Blaise Pascal wrote, “I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.”

The first obstacle is the effort required to develop simple rules. Like most worthwhile endeavors, it takes time and energy to get them right. The process of developing simple rules requires ruthless prioritization -- honing in on the essential and decluttering the peripheral.

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When explaining how he led Apple's resurgence from near bankruptcy, Steve Jobs emphasized the power of simplicity. “You have to work hard to get your thinking clear to make it simple,” Jobs said. “But it is worth it in the end because once you get there you can move mountains.”

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The third obstacle to simplicity is what we call the“myth of requisite complexity,” the mistaken belief that complex problems demand complicated solutions.

We rarely challenge that assumption because we forego expanding our options. One of those options is trust in human nature. Many organizations, for example, create and maintain detailed human resources policies that create “this is the way we do things here” type environments. Often, they go unchallenged for years.

After studying their human resources policies, executives at Netflix determined that 97 percent of their employees where trustworthy. Nearly all of the company's time writing, monitoring, and enforcing detailed personnel policies was directed at the remaining 3 percent.

Rather than continue to produce binders of detailed regulations, Netflix executives concentrated on not hiring people who would cause problems, and removing them quickly when hiring mistakes were made. This change allowed the company to replace thick manuals with simple rules.

The company's policy for expenses, travel, gifts, and conducting personal business at work, for example, was reduced to four rules: (1) expense what you would not otherwise spend, (2) travel as if it were your own money, (3) disclose nontrivial gifts from vendors, and (4) do personal stuff at work when it is inefficient not to.

Rather than counter complexity with complexity of our own making, we should seek to sharpen the quality of our thinking and our decision-making ability.

The process to craft simple rules starts with understanding what moves the needles and identifying the bottleneck. Testing and refining through use help improve the rules by adapting them to new conditions.

Winning and succeeding are not the same thing. Coach John Wooden talks about his beliefs and the philosophy that shaped his life. He says:

“Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you're capable. I believe that's true. If you make the effort to do the best of which you're capable, trying to improve the situation that exists for you, I think that's success, and I don't think others can judge that; it's like character and reputation -- Your reputation is what you're perceived to be; your character is what you really are. And I think that character is much more important than what you are perceived to be.”

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“I believe starting on time, and I believe closing on time. And another one I had was, not one word of profanity. One word of profanity, and you are out of here for the day. If I see it in a game, you're going to come out and sit on the bench. And the third one was, never criticize a teammate. I didn't want that. I used to tell them I was paid to do that. That's my job. I'm paid to do it. Pitifully poor, but I am paid to do it. Not like the coaches today, for gracious sakes, no. It's a little different than it was in my day. Those were three things that I stuck with pretty closely all the time.”

“Cosimo de Medici persuaded Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine sculptor, to enter his service by writing him a letter which concluded, 'Come, I will choke you with gold.'”

A quote opening the chapter on jobs in advertising and how to get them in David Ogilvy's classic book On Advertising.

The image above is an ad David Ogilvy wrote for Guinness as head of his own agency at 39. To specific and factual descriptions are a very personal, direct, and natural style of storytelling.

Each oyster image has its caption and Ogilvy provides rich descriptions formatting them as mini-sagas. Take the Cape Cods, for example. He says:

An oyster of superb flavor. Its chief enemy is the starfish, which wraps its arms about the oyster and forces the valves open with its feet. The battle lasts for hours, until the starfish is rewarded with a good meal, but alas, no Guinness.

How about the Bluepoints:

These delicious little oysters from Great South Bay somewhat resemble the famous English 'natives' of which Disraeli wrote: “I dined or rather supped at the Carlton ... off oysters, Guinness and broiled bones, and got to bed at half past twelve. Thus ended the most remarkable day hitherto of my life.”

For lovers of the Delaware Bay, he says:

This was William Penn's favorite oyster. Only 15% of oysters are eaten on the half-shell. The rest find their way into stews, or end their days in a blaze of glory as “Angels on Horseback.” One oyster was distinctly heard to whistle.

Regardless of which oysters we like or choose:

All oysters test their best when washed down with drafts of Guinness -- what Professor Saintsbury in “Notes on a Cellar-Book” called “that noble liquor - the comeliest of black malts.” Most of the malt used in brewing Guinness comes from the fertile farms of Southern Ireland, and the yeast used by Guinness in Dublin one hundred and ninety years ago.

In small sprint below this copy, the secondary call to action that reinforces the main one:

For a free reprint of this advertisement, suitable for framing, write Arthur Guinness Son & Co., Inc., 47-24 27th Street, Long Island City, New York.

The ad is from 1951. It's the work of a person who enjoys his craft.

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Benvenuto Cellini was a polymath (Who are the new polymaths?) -- an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, draftsman, soldier, musician, and artist who also wrote a famous autobiography and poetry#. Therefore the quote above about Cosimo de Medici promising gold is even more interesting. Cosimo de Medici was a sponsor of the arts, uniting all public services into a single building, the Uffizi (“Offices.”#)

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There is a story behind every relationship, including the one we have with our work and that we have with our self. That story reflects in our product and behavior.

If we were less relentlessly independent -- a characteristic that the current western culture and environment encourages -- we would find the question less intimidating. With a few exceptions -- for example in a quid pro quo context, or with a family member or friend -- we also hesitate or actively resist asking.

We want others “to see us once beautiful and brave,” as poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote. But he preceded it with “perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting,” which means it is how we respond to the dire situations life throws at us that makes us beautiful and brave, not the problems themselves.

From hard to art

“Whether it’s in the arts, at work, or in our relationships, we often resist asking not only because we’re afraid of rejection but also because we don’t even think we deserve what we’re asking for.”

Asking is an art. “Almost every important human encounter boils down to the act, and the art, of asking,” she says. More memoir than how-to guide, the stories in the book, as in her TED Talk, give us a view into human nature and the power of connection.

How do we ask each other for help? When can we ask? How often? Who's allowed to ask? Are some of the very questions we ask ourselves. She says:

“We, as 21st century human beings, have an incredibly hard time asking for certain things. Something, somehow, has blocked us from feeling like we can turn to one another for help.”

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“In both the art and the business worlds, the difference between the amateurs and the professionals is simple. The professionals know they’re winging it. The amateurs pretend they’re not.”

When we approach asking as a gesture of hope and optimism, we find connection and personal growth as a result. Learning to ask restores our energy, reduces stress, clarifies relationships, and helps us solve problems. Dr. Deborah Serani, a psychologist who’s been in practice for over 20 years, says:

“Asking for help creates an atmosphere of empowerment. It communicates to others that, while you may not have the answers, you are willing to find them and make things better.”

Why resist? Questions do matter, and we can learn to become more effective at asking.

Asking is an acquired skill

LinkedIn used to provide forums for professionals to ignite conversations on a variety of topics and domains. An analysis of the postings revealed a lot about the person making the inquiry. For example, how a question is formulated reveals a lack of confidence in one's abilities, or when someone has not done their homework and does not share enough information about their objectives.

We fear rejection and that others will perceive us as weak for asking. That's because we hold onto the myth that successful people never ask. Dr. Serani says:

“Actually, successful individuals will tell you that the key to success is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Learning how to delegate, asking for help and letting others show you the way are part of the plan. Successful people are driven and motivated — and when the going gets tough, the tough ask for help!”

Dubbed an anti-self-help book, Mayday is an exploration into the myriad of reasons why we don't ask for help, how we can benefit from asking, and how to ask the right people at the right time in the right place, thus increasing our opportunities for meeting our needs. Klaver says:

“Seven out of ten people admit they could have used help over the last week but didn't ask for it.”

The reason, says Klaver, is that we don't recognize we have a need until we are in a crisis. Often we are also unclear as to what we need. The book includes a seven-step process that starts with the important steps of naming the need -- being as specific as possible -- and staying open to possibilities.

Being specific is good. Breaking something down into smaller pieces is also very helpful. When I was learning to perfect English for simultaneous interpreting and the translation of panel conferences and dialogues, I used a karate-style ladder of progressive difficulty as a technique to ask increasingly bigger favors.

With no agenda other than learning, the ladder allowed for modulating the level of control at each phase easing me into bigger asks. The idea came from the philosophy of master Gichin Funakoshi as expressed in Karate-Do: My Way of Life -- “into the empty hand falls freedom.” Karate-Do or of the empty hand is about being strong to face oneself. The philosophy stayed with me long after I stopped training for higher belts.

Holding back from asking limits our opportunities

One potential reason for holding back is that we want to show we have answers, that we are experts.

In the Q&A after the talks at Dare Conference someone asked how they could reconcile the soft skills like becoming better at asking for what we need in our jobs from the expectation that we are experts in our field.

It's helpful to learn to separate the self from the task -- hard on problems, soft on relationship. For one, projects require we collaborate with other experts, and asking questions is also a good way to cultivate positive relationships with colleagues.

It's the same thought process of highly successful individuals -- people may respond or not to a request; but this doesn't mean it's a wholesale rejection of us as a person.

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For some courage, watch Amanda Palmer TED Talk below.

Like most industries, the music business has undergone tremendous change. Artists have more opportunities to get closer to their audiences, and they are also less insulated from the business side of things. At about minute 9, Palmer says:

And the media asked, “Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy. How did you make all these people pay for music?”

And the real answer is, I didn't make them. I asked them. And through the very act of asking people, I'd connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you.

It's kind of counter intuitive for a lot of artists. They don't want to ask for things. But it's not easy. It's not easy to ask. And a lot of artists have a problem with this. Asking makes you vulnerable.

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Now, the online tools to make the exchange as easy and as instinctive as the street, they're getting there. But the perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but, more important -- to ask without shame.

To put in even more poetic terms, Rilke says:

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.